Month: November 2016

Today I reached 66,000 words on my new novel, which has the working title Calling to Kill. The climactic point in the story has been reached, and now I just need to wind everything up nicely.

It is a sort of crime story, but also just a story about the dangers of seeking to be a change maker and what fanatical belief in religion can lead to.

I take my inspiration from my strange time at Kensington Temple in London, from 1997-2002. This fanatical, charismatic church was in my not so humble view a Petri dish of madness, and my crime novel is a fantasy very much inspired by some of the characters I met in my time there.

Unlike me, my hero will not turn Atheist. I do not wish this to be an attack on Christianity as such. That is such an easy target. If we really want to challenge dangerous religious fanaticism these days, we need to turn our attention to Islam and the violence and vehemence it seems to engender against women, gays, and Western values in general. But that must be a future project.

Calling to Kill will hopefully be enjoyable for people of faith as well as those without. And now: publishers out there, this is your chance. I do not have a contract with my previous publisher, so I am free. This book will be a killing…(pun intended).

The drawing is a little sketch of how I see the main protagonist, Bjørn-Eirik.

Vaguely related to the writing process is my morning walk. I tend to get up at 5am to write for a couple of hours, and then, if I don’t need to start my day job early, I go for a refreshing morning walk. I am blessed by my being in close proximity to some lovely countryside paths (see pictures). On these morning walks I often meet dog walkers. Very generally, these tend to fall into two broad categories: a) The bestubbled gents of a certain age, almost always with a decrepit dog that hobbles along on the three legs that are still just about working, and b) the Yummy mummy types, clad in Hunter wellies and with a rosy complexion, often with 3 or more dogs, all healthy and bounding along.

The rule when meeting either of these categories is, in case of a: a nod and “mornin'” to which the bestubbled gentleman will remove his self rolled cigarette and grumble “mornin'” before having a smokers’ coughing fit. In the case of b you have to first ascertain whether they are going to blank you or not, then, if not, a chirpy “good morning” (intonation should be falling, as if declaring it, not rising as if singing it), to which they will reply a snappily pronounced “g’morning” and then call “Geraaald” to one of their canine charges.

But this morning I met a person (can’t bring myself to call him a “gentleman”) who did not fit into either of these two categories. I was first met by his dog. It was a labrador. If the old bestubbled gents of a certain age have a labrador, it tends to be very old and very scruffy; often very fat. It Yummy Mummies have a labrador it tends to be brown. This was neither. It was white, fluffy fur and quite healthy looking. Then the owner appeared. A man, not young, not old (around my own age I should image) but trying to look cool, with a mane of hair wore long at the ears and back. I suppose the Yummy Mummies would find him attractive in the sort of way they may find the gardener or builder attractive. I nodded and said “Good morning”, in a combination of greetings a and b. “Mornin!” he said, “How ya doin’?” “How ya doin'”? “HOW YA DOIN'”? Where on earth did he think he was? California? I was put out, but my defence mechanism soon kicked in: “fine, thank you, lovely day, isn’t it?”. He laughed an oh-dear-that-old-cliché-well-I-guess-you’re-only-trying-to-be-friendly-you-poor-conventional-guy-sort of laughter: “he-he-he, yeah”, and disappeared down the path.

It is of course not the building material of which the headline speaks, but of the source of the money that built one of the most visited of East Anglia’s great wool churches: St Peter and St Paul’s Church, Lavenham, in the green and pleasant county of Suffolk. The village of Lavenham is itself very much worth a visit by anyone with even a smattering of interest in history and/or architecture – apart from the cars it is like walking into a film set in the 15th century – but that is a post of its own. The first trace of building work on the church is dated 1473, and it was finished in 1525. More details here, for the interested reader. We have the generosity of the rich clothier Thomas Spring and the patronage of John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, for the magnificence of this ecclesiastical edifice.

I only want to add a few words about my own sense of a awe, as I entered what is a worship in stone, masonry and wood. A reminder, more needed than ever, of a time when material wealth were, as of course, channelled into the spiritual needs of the community. I also sensed that it was a living church, NOT a museum. They had a children’s area with toys and soft furnishing, a second hand book corner (I really loved that – with an honesty box to pay for your chosen goods), and a little shop. I will leave the pictures to give you an, albeit inadequate, impression, and hopefully tempt you to visit, if at all possible.

Sir William Addison, in his book Local Styles of the English Parish Church, notes that light was all important to the builders of the great East Anglian churches (page 118). I hope my pictures (amateurish as they are) can give you at least a morsel of a sense of this. The overwhelming sensation when standing at the back of the nave of this church was space and light.

Light and space, from the back of the nave.

My daughter and friends light candles for their loved ones.

Bit tower and little tower,

Notice the straight parapets, without the adornment of battlements, on this 114 ft. tower.

The strange and moving infant grave.

The 16th century Spourne Parclose

The open pews add to the sense of light and space in the church.

Entrance to the the little tower, containing an old Suffolk bell cast in around 1346.

One of the royal seals on display.

A rare feeling of open space and light.

The font dates from the 14th century.

Chapel containing a moving tribute to the fallen in war, with the baptismal font in the foreground.

Getting back into the swing of things with another Top 5 Wednesday, a weekly book meme set up by Gingerreadslainey and hosted by Sam@thoughtsontomes, you can find the Goodreads group here. This week we’re picking the back cover summaries that totally misrepresent a book’s contents.

Personally, I’ve always hated the phrase ‘don’t judge a book by it’s cover’, I mean, I know it’s a metaphor but there are people who spend a lot of time and effort designing them! The whole point of the cover is to allow you to quickly gauge the genre, topic or themes of a book. The synopsis should be an addendum to that, the second step, a brief, spoiler-free explanation of the story found inside.

Unfortunately of course it doesn’t always quite work out like that. That said, I actually had some trouble with this one! So here are my top 5…

Still very slowly building my blogging steam, but here’s an update: the new novel/story/text is coming along very nicely, at least in quantity: it now stands on just over 50 000 words, and the climax of the story is very near. (Goodness, that was a long sentence). Once that is pulled off I only need another few thousand words to finish the whole thing in a satisfactory way. I do actually think I can do this. Encouraging.

Title: I guess it should not be the author’s preoccupation, not least since a publisher may take it completely out of our hands, but I do feel a good title would be Calling to Kill. Especially because of the double meaning of “calling”, both coming to visit, and the religious calling that you receive. We can also add on calling on the telephone or calling out as in shouting. I do like ambiguous titles.

Just finished reading Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, and that is a good title. It is also slightly disheartening that I shall never be able to write as well as Waugh (I also like alliteration). Never mind, that is a high bar, after all. I only know that I now want to pretend that one of my previous jobs was as a chub fuddler.

Lastly today, I include a picture of a beautiful edition of Dracula, that I bought for my daughter (she is reading if for school). I was going to buy a £4.99 cheap version, then I saw this at considerably higher cost and thought Men liveth not by bread alone, and went for it. What a nice feeling it is to hold a properly produced hard back book. I hope my daughter also feels that way. If it increases her joy of reading it will have been worth the extra expense.